Under the Glacier (23 page)

Last night it was asserted that Godman Sýngmann’s head had been stolen. It was also firmly alleged last night that the professor’s fresh grave in the churchyard was not genuine. What does Tumi Jónsen say, that historian of historians at Glacier? Would he declare upon his Christian conscience that reliable men reckoned that a notable angler, whom some sources nevertheless state to have been a tycoon, was buried in this churchyard? Is there anything more likely than that honest and truthful men of the historian’s progeny will come forth and maintain, not without good cause, that this churchyard had been abandoned for fifty years and that some practical joker had amused himself by using a grave there and putting something or perhaps nothing into it? Perhaps there were some coarse youngsters from other districts at work, or some naughty children, to hoax people. It could well be right, as some people think, that this Godman Sýngmann was some other person altogether.

I was beginning to fear I would be bringing my superiors down south nothing but a book of dreams instead of a report from this mission to Glacier. It would make matters worse if one had to add a book of dream interpretations.

I tiptoed to the veranda of the bungalow to see if I could find any signs of something having happened. I saw none at first glance and became afraid. There is no more terrifying experience for a Christian than to discover he has suddenly become a rationalist. The curtains were drawn at the windows just as the butler James Smith had left them, no sign of any human habitation anywhere around, the house dead. Where was the great salmon? Vanished, as if the earth had swallowed it! Merely a little more bird dirt than before on the veranda. But when I began to inspect the place more closely, I noticed the county seal lying in a corner. The seal, in other words, had been broken, and scarcely in a dream. But who had broken it? Was it this woman? Or some other woman? Or some practical jokers? What would Tumi Jónsen say about it?

When I was sidling off the veranda again I caught sight of a little something that in itself was hardly worth mentioning: one head-bone of a fish, picked clean, lying in front of the woman’s door. Although the woman I had dreamt was perhaps not real, there had nonetheless, whatever anyone says, been a real fish lying on the veranda last night.

41

Repairing the
Quick-Freezing Plants

Truth to tell I was relieved when I got out of sight of the house, because I felt it was staring after me; yet I know perfectly well that nothing is more ridiculous than being afraid of the dark in clear weather one early morning a month before the solstice. I was hoping that pastor Jón Prímus would be in his shed repairing broken-pointed knives and worn-out sewing machines from the nineteenth century.

When I reached the gravel patch behind the lava hillock in the homefield I caught sight of the Imperial, which, for its part, had rematerialised. The car had been neatly parked, and some women’s things lay on the backseat. The parish pastor’s repair shed, on the other hand, was fastened with a padlock.

Pastor Jón Prímus sat on a stone by the roadside ready to leave, that’s to say he had turned up the collar of his jacket and had his toolbox on his knees. Apart from that he was bareheaded and blue in the face, probably had neither slept nor eaten. He was waiting.

Good morning, pastor Jón.

Good morning.

Embi: So the big car’s back.

Pastor Jón had no comment to make on that.

Embi: Are you setting off on a journey, pastor Jón?

Pastor Jón: I am waiting for a man who’s giving me a lift.

Embi: Going far?

Pastor Jón: Over the mountain. The quick-freezing plant that is both out of order and bankrupt has now been given a subsidy of a million. They’re going to try to start it up again. They asked me to help to repair the machinery. Jódínus is coming to fetch me.

Embi: Hmm, you know of course that Guðrún Sæmundsdóttir has arrived?

Pastor Jón: Oh, did she say that was her name?

Embi: Haven’t you met her?

Pastor Jón: I saw a woman arriving late last night.

Embi: Do you really need to go away today? I have an idea the woman has come to see you.

Pastor Jón: By the way, have you had anything this morning?

Embi: Not very much, no. But it doesn’t matter. I’m going south today.

Pastor Jón now got up from the stone and said: It’s no good walking about like this with your mouth watering all day. I haven’t had anything either, actually. But I’ve got some shark meat here. May I not offer you some?

Embi: I’m rather unaccustomed to shark meat. I’ve heard that it stinks.

Pastor Jón: Shark meat is the greatest delicacy in Iceland. Shark meat only smells high for the first twelve years. This stuff is thirteen years old and the ammonia has long since left it. It is fragrant.

Pastor Jón pulled out of his pocket a handsome piece of this national delicacy wrapped in a newspaper and tied with pack-thread. It was a piece with an eye in it. This sea creature is called in Latin “sleepy small-head,” and if one sees its eye one understands the name (
somniosus microcephalus
). The parish pastor took out his clasp-knife and cut himself a slice, chewed and smacked his lips, and pursed his mouth while he was assessing the taste, and then said: It’s just right.

And in this comment there emerged the only tendency towards orthodoxy that the undersigned has been able to detect in pastor Jón Prímus.

I thought it best to be kind to the pastor, and started chewing the stuff and rolling it round my mouth out of curiosity, and found it a little strange in taste but not exactly bad. We both chewed away busily. When I had swallowed one piece, I wanted another. This is alkaline, said pastor Jón, and I can’t vouch for the parish pastor’s chemistry. But if only for the way he preached shark meat, everyone could see that this pastor Jón was a good pastor.

When we had chewed shark meat for a while, I came back to the matter at hand.

Embi: As was said, your wife has arrived, pastor Jón. There shouldn’t be any more flies in the ointment now.

Pastor Jón: Yes, she is undoubtedly an excellent woman. And you are a young man. Why don’t you have her?

Embi: Your wife?

Pastor Jón: The woman who came last night, the woman you are talking about.

Embi: Úa?

Pastor Jón: The Úa who came is not the one who went away. Because in the first place Úa cannot go away, and in the second place she cannot come back. She doesn’t come back because she didn’t go away. Úa remained with me, as I told you when we met here in the shed for the first time. She didn’t remain just outwardly but above all within myself. Who could take your mother away from you? How could your mother leave you? What’s more, she is closer to you the older you become and the longer it is since she died.

Embi: Both you, pastor Jón, and the woman herself have each separately confirmed to the bishop’s emissary the fact of your marriage. Though a woman leaves for thirty-five years, that doesn’t alter anything. That isn’t a long moment of time in Christian belief.

Pastor Jón: There is no other Úa than the one who has always lived with me and never gone from me for a single moment. She is closer to me than the flower of the field and the light of the glacier, because she is fused with my own breath. The one thing that remains is what lives deepest within yourself, even though you glide from one galaxy to another. Nothing can change that. And now let’s munch our shark meat.

Embi: According to my brief, pastor Jón, and without being involved at all: personally I would suggest that you go to see this woman and leave the quick-freezing plants alone today.

Pastor Jón: The quick-freezing plants have priority: that is the agreement.

Embi: I have heard that quick-freezing plants don’t make money. Who made an agreement with whom? Let the dead bury their dead, if only for a day.

Pastor Jón: All life is built upon agreement. I thought you knew that we have to agree upon whether we are to live; otherwise there will be war. But if we make an agreement to live, then we gladly hand over our last penny to the quick-freezing plants. And then it no longer matters whether the quick-freezing plants make money and whether the machinery in them is working or at a standstill.

Embi: Well, I’m talking on behalf of a human being, my dear pastor Jón; on behalf of a soul. It is my opinion that the soul has priority over the quick-freezing plants.

Pastor Jón: I think the quick-freezing plants are closer to God than the soul, but that is really a question of agreement.

Embi: What is the point of repairing quick-freezing plants that never pay and are run by clowns at the public expense?

Pastor Jón: Do we defend the cause of earthly life because it pays?

Embi: We have to have some glimmer or other.

Pastor Jón: There are others who live off public funds than just the quick-freeing plants. Isn’t everyone bust, so to speak? If everyone isn’t to be wound up because of debts at once, we have to agree about something; no matter what it costs—no matter what damned nonsense it is—there has to be agreement. People have to agree for instance about the fact that money has to be somewhere—with the rich if there’s no alternative, in the banks, at the very least with the State. Yet everyone knows that money is fundamentally an invention, a fiction.

Embi: I had, however, thought that the first step would be to agree that something is true and then all try to live together by it.

Pastor Jón: It is pleasant to listen to the birds chirping. But it would be anything but pleasant if the birds were always chirping the truth. Do you think the golden lining of this cloud we see up there in the ionosphere is true? But whoever isn’t ready to live and die for that cloud is a man bereft of happiness.

Embi: Should there just be lyrical fantasies, then, instead of justice?

Pastor Jón: Agreement is what matters. Otherwise everyone will be killed.

Embi: Agreement about what?

Pastor Jón: It doesn’t matter. For instance quick-freezing plants, no matter how bad they are. When I repair a broken lock, do you then think it’s an object of value or a lock for some treasure chest? Behind the last lock I mended there was kept one dried skate and three pounds of rye-meal. I don’t need to describe the enterprise that owns a lock of that kind. But if you hold that earthly life is valid on the whole, you repair such a lock with no less satisfaction than the lock for the National Bank where people think the gold is kept. If you don’t like this old, rusty, simple lock that some clumsy blacksmith made for an insignificant food-chest long ago, then there is no reason for you to mend the lock in a big bank. If you only repair machinery in quick-freezing plants that pay, you are not to be envied for your role.

Embi: What you say, pastor Jón, may be good poetry, but unfortunately has little relevance to the matter I raised with you—on behalf of the ministry.

Pastor Jón: Whoever doesn’t live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.

With that, pastor Jón Prímus wrapped the rest of the shark meat in the newspaper again, put it in his pocket, and held out in farewell his big, good hand, which has already been mentioned in these pages. NB: But perhaps my memory deceives me. Jódínus had arrived with the twelve-tonner to give the parish pastor a lift over the mountain range.

42

The Poetry of Saint John
of the Cross
and So On

The undersigned picked up the seal from the veranda, put it in his pocket, and rang the doorbell. The woman came to the door. She had fetched her things from the car during the night and was now wearing an ankle-length dressing gown. She looked bigger than yesterday. If it’s possible to call a face strongly built, it could be said of this woman; but the expression was without arrogance; no affectation in her demeanour, but her responses could be unpredictable. It cannot be denied that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from an individual of the breed that was thought to be exceptional flesh here at Glacier, descended from Ireland and Spain. It’s these women who never sleep. Now when I saw the woman again, scantily clad under her dressing gown, she seemed to confirm the theory that women do not attain the beauty that appealed to Stone Age man in accordance with the Willendorf Venus recipe until they are about fifty and have had their children and lost them, with a new era before them. The bishop’s emissary said good morning.

Woman: San Juan de la Cruz!

She opened the door wide and let me in and closed it. Then she put me on the twin settee, stroked my cheek with the back of her hand like a child, sat down beside me, and asked me my news; and from underneath the gown emerged a pair of unexpectedly young legs with good calves, which didn’t start thickening until above the knee, everything precisely according to the recipe of the village of Willendorf.

Embi: Forgive me for being rather early afoot. But since the authorities expect me to concern myself with people who don’t concern me at all, I had better tell you that pastor Jón has gone.

The woman got to her feet and fetched her knitting needles and sat down opposite me in a chair.

Where did pastor Jón go? she asked.

Embi: The pastor went to repair a quick-freezing plant.

Woman: Can’t I offer you a cup of tea, by the way, Saint?

Embi: Well perhaps, thank you, I haven’t had anything except shark meat this morning.

The woman went out to the kitchen and I studied her knitting while she was away. After a while she brought me tea and some sweet biscuits in a rectangular packet.

Embi: If I’m not mistaken, there’s a flower starting on madam’s sea-mittens.

Woman: It is my dream that sea-mittens will eventually become so beautiful that it will be possible to wear them when going on a Christmas visit to one’s aunt.

I didn’t think it right to go on about sea-mittens for the time being: better to get to the bottom of the matrimonial situation here before I left; the woman wasn’t going to explain her “dream” further, anyway, but asked: What’s a quick-freezing plant?