World Light (18 page)

“I thank you with all my heart,” said the poet, taking a sip of his water, and finding it difficult to conceal his joy at being allowed to leave. Whatever the woman said, however much she praised Providence, deep within himself he heard only the one voice which cried out in panic, “Away, away!” He took his bundle from under the pillow and offered the old woman his hand. But when he had said good-bye to her, he had not the courage to shake hands with the rest of the household. Away, away from these faces! Away from this fetid air! Away! Some sights would make even the most hideous deity seem improbable, let alone the more beautiful gods. They can usurp a man’s soul and dominate his consciousness with dreadful tyranny all his life; their monstrous faces peer forth incessantly, even in the midst of the most beautiful visions; they go on forever corrupting even the loveliest thoughts with bitter gall, oh, away! In his flight he bumped into the walls and the doorpost, like a man trying to escape in a dream.

2

He was standing in the open. He had got his freedom, certainly, but freedom is not an aim in itself, and he had no idea where to go; the question was, what ways were open to him? Gradually his heartbeat steadied after his flight, but he remained standing in the roadway with his bundle under his arm, staring into the blue.

Then he heard someone saying from the other side of the road, “Who are you?” It was the girl standing in the doorway; she was still leaning against one of the doorposts, with her toes braced against the other.

He did not know what to say: who was he, indeed? It was an open question; certainly, he had been something once—a corner of a living room, a sloping ceiling, a ray of sunshine, a poem by Sigurður Breiðfjörð—but now? He did not know; no one knew.

“My name is Ólafur Kárason,” he said, so as not to look a complete fool, but very uncertainly, and had a twinge of conscience at once because he felt he had no right to say “I” nor any other word of that land. To add “of Ljósavík” would have been to make himself a laughingstock before God and man; it did not even occur to him.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“I’m told I was born in this parish,” he said. “But actually I’m from Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti.”

“Hahaha!” said the girl. “Fotarfótur! I’ve never heard anything like it in my life! Hahaha, hahaha!”

“I’ve been an invalid,” he said, in the hope that she would stop laughing. She stopped laughing.

“Have you come here for treatment?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “I was brought here.”

He did not dare to confide in such a laughter-prone girl the story of the miracle at Kambar. What is a miracle, after all? The old woman in the house behind him had connected it with the devil; but when he looked at this cheerful and natural young girl standing in her doorway, it suddenly occurred to him that a miracle was at once both ridiculous and humiliating, and he blushed scarlet.

“Were you brought here?” she asked. “Who brought you? Are you on the parish, perhaps?”

“Yes,” he said, hanging his head. “Unfortunately.”

He was very ashamed of having to admit such a thing to a fine young girl, but she did not hold it against him, far from it. She was quite ready to reassure him: “Everyone will be on the parish soon, hahaha!” she said. “How many brothers and sisters have you got?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Hahaha, doesn’t even know how many brothers and sisters he’s got!” she said. “I’ve got nine, and some have got far more, yes, and no mother, either. Have you got a mother?”

“Yes,” he said, with assurance.

“My mother’s dead,” said the girl. “She died last year, hahaha!”

The boy did not quite know how to take this unexpected announcement of death; perhaps he should have told the truth, that he did not really have a mother either; but the girl was much more quick-witted than he and instantly asked him another question; she was a very agreeable girl and quite certainly a nice person.

“What’s that you’ve got under your arm?” she asked.

“It’s my things,” he said.

“Is it shoes?”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t got any shoes except these thin shoes I’m wearing just now.”

“I haven’t got any shoes either,” she said, and kicked her legs in the air one after the other to show what dilapidated shoes she was wearing, and it was certainly true, her shoes were old and cracked although they had originally been made in Denmark. But her calves were young and rounded, the knees large and strong, and he had never seen so far up a girl’s legs before. And despite the bad shoes, he had never seen such legs, and he stared fascinated at the way she kicked her feet up.

“With luck they’ll manage to sell the estate this summer,” she said, when she had smoothed her dress down again.

“What estate?” he said sharply, and instinctively pressed his bundle more tightly under his arm.

“The estate,” she said.

“Aren’t there many estates?” he said.

“No, I mean just this one estate—you know,” she said. “Some people think that if it gets sold, things will start to improve.”

“Are things going badly?” he asked. “What’s going badly?”

“Do you see that rusty hulk out there at the anchorage? That’s our trawler,
Númi
. Obviously, it was seized against the Regeneration Company’s debts just about the time it was due to start fishing; so it won’t be providing much food for the larder this year any more than previously. And the cutter
Júliana
was lost the year before last, as everyone knows. The Privy Councillor went to Denmark a long time ago, and the fish have all disappeared; no herring’s been seen for as long as I can remember, and the Regeneration Company—that’s just wind in Pétur
ríhross’s guts, to say nothing worse in front of a total stranger. No, there’s nothing here at all now, nothing, except for a bit of quarrying in the spring, and fewer get that than want it.”

“Quarrying?” echoed the boy foolishly, not understanding a word of what the girl was saying.

“Yes, it’s called government rock,” said the girl. “It’s been going on for three years now. It’s the men who quarry rock for the government.”

“What government is that?” asked the boy.

“Oh, it’s just that damned pest of a government,” said the girl. “It’s that same old government it’s always been, the government of the high-ups, the gentry, the ones in the south who own all the money. You can’t be so ignorant that you haven’t heard people talking about it. All I know is that the rock is called government rock, and it’s down there on the foreshore just beside the anchorage, and my father’s allowed to carry rock there to meet his account at the Regeneration Company for provisions. Some people say it’s to be used for building some sort of harbor there eventually, but I suspect the ships that are to use it are in the same place as the new shoes I’m going to get for the Churchyard Ball this autumn, hahaha! It’s more likely to turn out to be a cabbage patch, if you ask me. Can you dance?”

“No,” he replied. “Unfortunately.”

“You simply must learn to dance,” she said. “There’s really nothing in the whole world so much fun as dancing. Oh, there was such a lovely song I learned at the Churchyard Ball last year.”

And she sang:

“ ‘D’you think that Gróa’s got some shoes,
Got some shoes, got some shoes?
Then I think she won’t have much to lose
When she starts to marry.
Got some shoes, got some shoes,
D’you think that Gróa’s got some shoes?
Then I think she won’t have much to lose
When she starts to tralalala.’

“Oh, here comes that damned parish officer!”—in a flash she was gone and had slammed the door, and the boy was left standing where he was in the roadway.

“Who are you, and what are you gaping at?” asked the parish officer.

He was a thickset, suspicious, waddling fellow with freckled hairy hands and an obstinate face, and not particularly civil in his manner of address, either. Ólafur Kárason told him his name. It turned out that the parish officer had not only heard about his supernatural cure, but had very decided views about his character. He said it was easy to guess how ill he must have been, if it needed no more than currents and vibrations from that young witch at Kambar to get him on his feet: “These are the sort of layabouts for whom honest men here in Sviðinsvík have to sweat blood, while you lot spend your youth in bed for fun and fill your bellies in far-off districts. No, it’s certainly high time you had your share of quarry work, my lad!”

He waddled off at once towards the quarry with the boy, but the boy had difficulty in walking very fast because his legs were too long for him and, besides, his legs were unquestionably of uneven length and changed length at every step; he was therefore inclined to take too large a stride with the leg that was too long at any given moment, and had difficulty in walking straight, and sometimes he was almost in the ditch quite against his will and intention; in addition, he felt giddy in the head, rather like having the staggers.

“What’s this, you young devil?” said the parish officer. “Are you drunk?”

“No,” said the boy. “But my legs are too long.”

“Rubbish!” said the parish officer.

Round them gathered untidy groups of children who had been playing in the ditch or on the barbed wire fences; they mobbed the boy because he was long and wearing a scarf, and they uttered all kinds of cries like animals sending distress signals.

The weather was beautiful, the sun shone from a clear sky, the sea a lovely blue, the fields revelling in contentment. More and more children arrived. Everything went black before the boy’s eyes; he tripped over a stone and stumbled. The children let out a howl and showered abuse on him. Some of them played at barging into him to bring him down again. It is difficult to say how it would have ended if the children had not caught sight of an even more attractive entertainment. An old, half-blind woman came tottering round the corner of a house, feeling her way with a stick. When the children saw her they changed their tack and rushed at her, giving tongue as before: “Gudda bell, Gudda bell!” But some of them wandered over to two drunks who were standing in the road shaking hands endlessly, like a bridal couple, and heaped their jeers and abuse on them instead.

On the foreshore there were between twenty and thirty men carrying rocks; others were sitting astride large boulders and driving iron wedges into them. But above the shore the fragrant heather moors took over; farther off, a fertile green valley cut into the mountain range with its moors and grasslands. The rock-carrying went on in a gloomy, funereal silence that contrasted strangely with the cheerful melodious voices of the summer birds from the heaths and moorland; there was a sullen, cold heaviness in the faces of these rock-carriers, quite out of keeping with the effortless flight of the birds and that glad spring landscape, the warmth from that tranquil, blue dreaming sea, and the moss-grown ledges of the mountain. These men were obviously undergoing punishment for some terrible crime they had committed. Their unlovely, dirty faces seemed to reflect that condemnation which no acquittal can remove, no rehabilitation erase. Here surrender and despair had their ultimate abode, the individual at one with his own misfortune in a complete confession of his crime, in an acknowledgment of having no atonement except unconditional subservience to, and acceptance of, the disgrace of ruin, without hope of a single drop of mercy.

What had these poor wretches done wrong? What crimes had brought on the fearful punishment that was etched on these outcast images of misery, those sallow-gray, hopeless, wispy-haired faces, and on the contemptible rags which a cruel and omnipotent judiciary had obviously, as a mark of disgrace, hung upon these exhausted, stunted, starved, rock-carrying bodies?

Farther up the fjord, someone was riding up and down with two spirited horses, and the dust from their hooves hung like cloud banks over the dry bridle paths in the still weather.

“What’s all that damned galloping over there?” said the parish officer.

“He’s breaking in horses,” said the men.

The parish officer took the parish pauper up to the path, where they waited awhile for the horseman. When he arrived, he all but rode them down. He was wearing a morning coat, a bowler hat, celluloid collar, pince-nez, and false teeth; his fiery young horses were dripping with sweat and blowing hard.

“What do you want, my lad?” asked the horseman.

“What do I want?” echoed the parish officer. “I want what I want.”

The rider dismounted, all covered with dust and horsehair, patted his horses and talked to them caressingly, but showed no enthusiasm for hearing what the parish officer had to say.

“Take this man on at the rock-shifting for me,” said the parish officer.

“Listen, my lad, what do you take me for?” asked the horseman. He had a very guttural voice.

“Oh, you should be grateful you’re not called anything worse than your proper name, Pétur
ríhross!” said the parish officer.

“Shut up!” said the horseman, and tried to mount again and ride on his way; but the parish officer seized the reins of his horse right at the bit.