Under the Glacier (22 page)

Embi: Why did you not remain with your husband whom you loved and respected? You weren’t abducted?

Women: Oh, no no.

Embi: Were you stolen, madam?

Woman: I was bought.

Embi: Was it Godman Sýngmann?

Woman: He put the money on the table, yes.

Embi: Is it possible to buy people?

Woman: It is possible to ask a shepherd girl to go riding even though she is married to a pastor. It is possible to ask her to go riding round the whole world. But when she comes back after a generation, she has been there all the time.

Embi: Isn’t it correct to say Professor Godman Sýngmann was a polygamist?

Woman: Who says so?

Embi: The butler cabled four widows.

Woman: Yes, and I’ve now taken the Imperial off him. We’ll see to it that he steals no more. Were it not for me, the poor wretch would be in jail where he belongs. I am going to save him from jail on this occasion, too.

Embi: Have you anything else to say about the wives of Godman Sýngmann? No exaggeration in that story?

Woman: Let us hope he had many. He was a man of the world. He lived all over the world. His friends the Imams had as many as three hundred wives. Both in Benares and Los Angeles they called him Lord Maitreya. What is a man like that to do with one female creature or two? Buddha had ten thousand women in his belly. When Mundi came back to Iceland as a young engineer and inventor with his millions from Sumatra and Australia, some people thought his hair so very soft. A shepherd girl from Neðratraðkot, newly married to a penniless country pastor and scarcely even started to sleep with him— she got the world as a gift from Mundi.

Embi: Who are these women? And where can they be found?

Woman: Doesn’t interest me. It’s three years now since I sent him a telegram to regard me as dead. I don’t know about others.

Embi: Did he believe that you were actually dead?

Woman: What do the gods believe? That’s one of the things we’ll never find out. We only know that they are above earthly life. It doesn’t occur to me for a moment that there’s a single trace of Mundi under that soil there in the churchyard.

Embi: That’s my business, madam: I am the one who was responsible to the ecclesiastical authorities for this funeral. On the other hand I suppose the ministry will want to know where you yourself stand as regards the law of the land and as regards international matrimonial law also, as regards the professor’s other wives, if there are any.

Woman: What laws are you talking about, my dear boy?

Embi: For example, laws against polygamy.

Woman: How should laws about polygamy concern me?

Embi: Excuse me for saying so, and mercifully there are no witnesses present: but I understood that you were married to two men at once and one of them was married to several women at the same time as you. Is that correct?

The woman stopped knitting: Who says that? What extraordinary rubbish to hear from such an intelligent boy!

Embi: I’m not accusing anyone, far from it. Least of all you. I was just sent here like any other ass to make inquiries about things that don’t concern me at all and that I don’t care about at all. As I said, there is no need for you to give me any answers.

Woman: I was not Godman Sýngmann’s wife. I am his daughter.

Embi: You’ll excuse me for choking a little on that, madam. How are my superiors to understand this?

Woman: Sýngmann was a British citizen. He adopted me under British law, according to which the one who adopts has to be twenty years older than the one adopted. I was seventeen, and Mundi was forty. I am his only child.

Embi: If I may ask, what did people in your district do when they were so amazed they couldn’t speak?

Woman: They stuck five fingers up their arse.

Embi: You must forgive me for not being sufficiently grown-up to use bad words except in moderation.

Woman: I pity you a little. A lot of people have found it difficult to understand me, unfortunately, especially I myself— and it was no better when I was younger. I don’t know how I can make you understand me. A romantic girl—do you know what that is?

Embi: No.

Woman: Never slept with a romantic girl?

Embi: It must be terrible.

Woman: What a very honest boy I think you must be! That’s how it was nonetheless, my dear. There is nothing to hinder a girl who has become a pastor’s wife for romantic reasons from falling in love with a man of the world. But though I was naive, it never occurred to Mundi, of course, to propose marriage to me. He simply put money on the table. And when he had adopted me he sent me to a convent school in Paris, because obviously a man of that kind didn’t want to have a stupid daughter. It wasn’t until much later when I was in my twenties that he wanted me as his mistress for a while, as if to make his apologies. But by then we had in fact become abstracts to one another, because he was always away on other continents making money and I had been learning needlework and Christian religion and German conjugations with the nuns and become a Catholic. And romance gone by the board, and long out of fashion in Paris. But I continued to be his daughter, of course, in spite of that.

Embi: I put it on record, then, that romance was gone by the board and long out of fashion in Paris. Excuse me, madam, but what is romance? I mean, how would one define romance for the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs?

I’ll tell you, replied the woman. When I was growing up, the greatest man in the world was Blondin. And “Parlez-moi d’Amour” was everybody’s song—especially if you didn’t know French. It took me unawares when I came to Paris to find that everyone had long ago forgotten my Blondin, and those who sang aloud about
l’Amour
were thought to be mad. Now they sang “Parlez-moi de la Pédérastie.”

Embi: Who was Blondin?

Woman: There you are, mon petit! Knows everything and hasn’t even heard of Blondin! Oh, they stretched a rope across Niagara Falls and made the poor wretch dance on it. That’s what’s done nowadays with those luckless creatures who are put into canisters and sent whirling round the earth—or was it perhaps round the moon. Human beings are constantly inventing new ways of maltreating one another. C’est la vie.

Embi: And what happened to that ugly new song you mentioned?

Woman: That was just about the only thing that some rosy-cheeked blue-eyed girls from Scandinavia learned during their first winter in Paris in those days. Now everyone has long since forgotten that too, apart from a few wretches like poor Saint Genet, whom they now want to turn into the principal saint and national poet of France. On the other hand Mundi was never the same person after having taken me from his best friend back home in Iceland. To atone for that, it wasn’t long before he made his daughter his sole heir in an indissoluble will, which is deposited with old Mowitz and his confrères in London. That’s to say I own all these possessions of Mundi’s all over the world, wherever they happen to be. If your bishop is short of a plug of tobacco, my dear, just tip me the wink.

Embi: Are you going to use this money yourself, madam? And what for, if I may ask?

Woman: Well it goes without saying that the legacy comes into the household here, pastor Jón’s and mine. My husband will of course decide what is to be done with this money. I pay no attention to matters of finance. I live by my knitting needles.

Embi: Would you let me write a book about you sometime, madam? About your relationship with Dr. Godman Sýngmann? And preferably another book about him, in fact?

Woman: Go ahead. Write as many books as you like, my dear.

Embi: He was a very remarkable man.

Woman: He was a wonderful man. No one who got to know him was ever the same again. He was the greatest man on earth next to my husband, pastor Jón Prímus. But he didn’t have communion.

Embi: Eh? Did I hear you wrong again, madam? Did Professor Dr. Godman Sýngmann not have communion?

Woman, for the second time: The dear man, this wonderful man, can you imagine it: he did not have communion.

Embi: I thought he not only had communion, but had The Supercommunion itself, written with capital letters.

Woman, for the third time: He did not have communion. Embi: And I thought he had even had communion with higher sentient beings in distant solar nebulae!

Woman: Am I not telling you that he lacked communion?

Embi: Do you perhaps mean communion with earthly beings such as I hope you are? That he had for instance to suffer the kind of spiritual and physical break that makes marriage meaningless?

Woman: He lacked the communion that says: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul, and all thy body, and thy neighbour as thyself.

Embi: But now that they have discovered that man hates himself more than any other living creature, how is he then to go about loving other men? Kill them perhaps?

Woman:
Qu’est-ce que tu as, mon petit!
What’s the matter with you, little one?

Embi: Do you have communion, madam?

Woman: How old are you?

Embi: Twenty-five.

Woman: I am fifty-two. Twenty-five and fifty-two: it’s the same age difference as there was between San Juan de la Cruz and Saint Theresa when they met for the first time.

Embi: And what happened?

The woman stopped knitting; she stood up: Go to bed, little one.

She opened the curtains in the dawn, and the gleam on the too-green homefield was almost uncomfortable.

The undersigned apologized for having forgotten himself, stuffed into his pocket the notebook that contained the main points, and switched off the slow-running tape recorder. The woman opened the door and let me out.

Embi: The ice has almost melted from your fish, madam. The water is flooding the porch. If we don’t meet again, I thank you for your ready answers and the pleasure of meeting you. I’m off to do my packing once again. My bus goes at a quarter to twelve.

Woman: Have you forgotten that you are invited to have some fish tomorrow?

40

Reality as the Head-Bone
of a Fish

It took the undersigned some time to pack his things into the duffel bag yet again, and especially to scribble out a summary of the day’s events from memory. The shadows thrown on the ground by a low house, even by the wall of a vegetable garden, were so huge that they were completely unreal. But what drew me to the window was the unusual vehemence of the birds outside, violent aggression accompanied by screams that bore no relation to the neutral night-bleating such as I had become accustomed to hearing from the cliffs through my sleep. If one looked out during the night at this time of year one would see one or two birds at the most, gliding past on some inscrutable errand. By complete contrast, there were now countless myriads of birds eddying and screaming over the farmhouse and the homefield. There were not just kittiwakes there, the inhabitants of the cliff; fulmars and greater black-backed gulls from the fishing banks, herring gulls, and even great skuas had come to take part in this choir; as far as I could see, some of them were clawing at one another upside down in the air. The churchyard overflowed with these hell-birds; they were crowded on the church roof and the bungalow. As a reporter from the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs I had no other choice than to stare passively at this phenomenon of Nature; besides, I would have had no authority to shoot even if I had had a field-gun.

This fiendish uproar was at its height for about fifteen minutes, and then subsided. The churchyard, however, continued to be covered with birds; except that now they sat still as if they were holding a meeting over some matter of importance that had taken place, and only screeched one at a time. More and more of them took off and flew away in silence to the sea. Others peered all around as if they were waiting for another miracle. Why is it that birds look far bigger on the ground than in flight? They looked of supernatural size to me. At last my interest in natural history was exhausted and I left these birds to themselves on the graves of the dead in the dawn, and went to sleep. Should I not delete everything on these pages about birds and fish? But there’s a risk that there would be little left if birds and fish are not to count.

Now all my things were in the duffel bag and there was nothing left but to say good-bye to pastor Jón Prímus and congratulate him on the fact that his wife had come home and everything was nice and settled at Glacier and also, let’s hope, at the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs.

I knocked on various doors and doorposts in the farmhouse but there was no reply. The fairy-ram woman, the one with the second sight, had perhaps got wind that the pastor’s wife was coming. Perhaps she calculated that now that she had served coffee to the Great Powers, and with the archenemy close by, it was time for housekeepers for their part to go out into the world and have fun, like pastors’ wives. Whatever the cause, no matter how much the undersigned tapped on doors, there was no sign of life.

The pastor would often return from his mending expeditions sometime between dawn and midmorning, but sometimes not at all; it was usually difficult to see any trace of whether he had been home or not. This time on the whole there were no signs of whether anyone had been coming or going, nor on the whole that there had been any life at all for a long time in this parsonage. The twelve-tonner was gone from the paving; the buttercups were awake between the paving stones, those that hadn’t been crushed beneath those eighteen wheels. The Langvetningur of the big horses was lost in the fogs of far-off districts that perhaps are not of this earth— that parish officer, cosmologist, and horse trader who singlehandedly had refuted Goethe’s saying that all theory is grey.

Although people in the ministry might not be inquiring specially about calves, the undersigned reckons that the farm-calf here deserves good marks for conduct and progress. Higher powers have released him from his tether, and some rams have come to visit him. The grass he is now guzzling was only in God’s mind ten days ago.